In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg – he of the social media leviathan and the sweaters – started a book group on Facebook, the idea being to open up a publish (ish) discussion of a book a fortnight for a year. The final list is pretty interesting – you can get more details on it here.

The Backlisted podcast, hosted by John Mitchison and Andy Miller, is a constant source of interesting books, at its focus is on the stuff which might have been forgotten about. You can hear all the podcasts on Soundcloud here, and I’ll attempt to keep this list as up to date as I can with the latest titles (if you want to hear me blathering on about one of the books here, The Riddle of the Sands, the relevant Backlisted episode is here).

A list of fourteen books and two short stories which Ernest Hemingway scribbled down for student Arnold Samuelson, when Samuelson travelled to meet him on Key West. For the full story, visit Dangerous Minds. The short stories were ‘The Blue Hotel’ and ‘The Open Boat’ by Stephen Crane.

[UPDATE: I started doing this. It was a crazy task. I’m not doing it anymore, but leaving this here as a memento to insanity]

Points are awarded on an entirely non-scientific basis:

Every time a book appears on a list, it gets a point

If I’ve read the book, it gets a point

If I loved the book, it gets an extra point

I think this makes the list as obscure as the New York Times bestsellers chart. It is designed to mix the personal with the scientific, and thus render the subsequent list almost entirely useless to anyone but me. Not least because I choose the lists, and I lean towards those which are personal and different, not the canonical Pulitzer and Booker lists that everyone knows.

The books are listed by title. This is also, perhaps, vaguely annoying.